Are changes in Earth's clouds boosting climate change?

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AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the Jan. 31 edition of Climate In The News.

Transcript

00:00Today we'll cover two different climate stories. The first, a key reason why 2024 was the hottest

00:06year on record. And the second story, a new area of study on how clouds are contributing

00:10to climate change. The first year from the BBC and discussing, Brett, CO2 and how that

00:15gas has risen at an increasing rate in 2024. And again, sort of just reiterates the importance

00:21of reducing emissions, right?

00:23Yeah, absolutely. What they found was in the study that CO2 levels rose more quickly last

00:29year than any other year before, which is actually surprising. The United States has

00:34actually seen it level off a little bit and decrease, which is good news, but worldwide

00:39that's bad news. So what does that mean? It's the highest levels of CO2 in the atmosphere

00:43in 2 million years, 50% higher than pre-industrial times. What is contributing to this? Partially,

00:51of course, large fires. What they found, ocean water temperatures were record warm. Warm

00:57oceans do not absorb CO2 as well as cooler oceans. So those are the two things to look

01:02at.

01:03Yeah. It also seems like that El Nino may have contributed a bit to that increased rate.

01:07Do we think there would be less of an increase in 2025 with more of a La Nina pattern emerging?

01:12You would think it would be. Cooler oceans, certainly that would help out a little bit.

01:17I also mentioned earlier the war in Ukraine, a lot of smoke and fire from that also contributing.

01:24So I have some hope for 2025. Hopefully things start to level off a little bit.

01:29Yeah, we've got to level it off and then decrease those emissions, obviously. So moving from

01:32that to a new area of study about cloud cover, this from Science Advisor, about how earth

01:38clouds are shrinking. And clouds play a really important role in sort of the entire earth

01:43process, right? Because they both absorb and reflect incoming solar radiation.

01:47Yeah, it depends on the type of cloud you have. Darker clouds absorb more of the earth's

01:53energy, more of the sun's energy. Lighter colored clouds reflect it. And what they're

01:57seeing as these lighter colored clouds, especially in the middle latitudes and along the equator,

02:02the area of those clouds is shrinking. And that may be explaining some of the surge in

02:07warmth we've seen over the past recent years, because some of that's been unexplained. So

02:13that's creating more of an energy imbalance. We already have an energy imbalance due to

02:17increased CO2, but this is creating more of an energy imbalance.

02:20There's been a previous study on sort of the impact of pollution on clouds. This seems

02:24to be more driven by the circulation patterns of the earth, right?

02:27Yeah, that's what they're finding, though there's still a lot of questions with the

02:29study, but they did not see anything related to pollution. Now, increased pollution actually

02:35leads to more reflectivity in a cooler scenario. Right now, we have less pollution than we

02:41did 40, 50 years ago. So that's led to an increase in more energy being absorbed by

02:47the earth.

02:48That's certainly a complex system, Brett, and how all these things interrelate in terms

02:51of our earth climate system. Well, thank you, Brett, for that information. We'll check back

02:56on those areas of study here as we get more research on it. For that information and other

03:00climate stories, you can find it at accuweather.com slash climate.

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